Systems for providing voice and data communications in office and other settings are receiving substantial commercial acceptance. Examples of such “convergent” voice/data communication systems are disclosed in U.S. application Ser. Nos. 09/055,072, 09/167,408, 09/283,101 and 09/368,460, which are assigned to the assignee of the present invention and incorporated herein by reference. Such systems provide desirable voice/data communications with a highly integrated system.
Such systems, however, provide a large number of features and options for configuring the system for the particular office environment. Exemplary information required to configure such a system include telephone subscriber directory information, WAN network configuration parameters such as T-1 channel data and voice trunk access, company call routing scenarios, voice mail parameters, LAN data network connection information and the like. Traditionally, there were persons skilled in telecommunications aspects of such systems (such as persons responsible for selling, configuring and installing PBXs, voice mail systems, telephone network connection services and the like), while different persons were skilled in data communication aspects of such systems (such as persons responsible for selling, configuring and installing LAN/WAN hardware and the like). In general, it has been difficult to locate and/or train persons sufficiently knowledgeable in both the telecommunications and data communications aspects of such systems, as the two fields historically have been quite distinct.
As a result, it has become difficult to sell, configure, install, reconfigure and/or service such integrated voice/data communications systems, and such activities generally have been more labor intensive than desired.